For a century, the United States defined progress through construction. Its engineers built dams, highways, rockets, and an economy that remade the world. Then, beginning in the 1960s, the nation turned inward. Law replaced design, rights replaced capacity, and moral authority displaced material ambition. While America perfected the art of regulation, China perfected the art of execution — transforming itself, in a single generation, into the world’s dominant engineering civilization.

This episode examines the long arc of that inversion: how the builder’s republic became a lawyerly one, how China’s technocracy filled the vacuum, and what this symmetry reveals about the limits of both. It is not a story of decline or triumph, but of two civilizations exchanging virtues and vulnerabilities until each became the other’s reflection.

Acknowledgment:This essay could not exist without the work of Christopher Caldwell and Dan Wang.Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement charts the moral and institutional transformation of postwar America, while Wang’s Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future captures the scale and logic of China’s technocratic ascent. Their ideas form the foundation of this analysis. Readers are encouraged to study their books directly; this work stands in gratitude to them both.

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